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This chapter lays out a theoretical framework for understanding referendum behaviour. The core component of the theory is a model of voting behaviour, which outlines how attitudes shape vote choices, influenced by the information that voters receive from political parties and other elites. The framework highlights first that differences in political interest among individuals also lead to diverse patterns of voting behaviour and second, that the campaign context shapes electoral outcomes. Politically aware voters base their vote choice on more sophisticated decision criteria and intense campaigns lead to more issue voting. These two aspects of referendum behaviour ‐ individual‐level differences and campaign effects ‐ are examined in a comparative analysis of EU referendums in the subsequent chapters.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 17 February 2018